Frank Underwood from House of Cards is a gamer. In fact, his love for videogames is so all-consuming that you can accurately judge his state of mind by noting the game he happens to be playing at any time.
Early on, back when Underwood was a hungry whip who’d stab his own grandmother if it would inch him closer to power, you’d see him indiscriminately spraying bullets around at clusters of enemies in Call of Duty. Later, when things started to get on top of him, he foolishly sang the praises of the PlayStation Vita; an endorsement so utterly baffling that he’d have never made president had anyone important actually heard it.
And now, three series in, Frank Underwood has finally secured the top job. So what game is he playing as president? World of Warcraft? Sim City? Civilisation? No – in episode five, Underwood reveals to a potential biographer that he’s really into Monument Valley.
This is a vast shift in taste. You don’t kill anyone in Monument Valley. In fact, you barely even see anyone. The independent puzzle game is the story of a princess who finds herself trapped in an Escher-style castle. The mood is unhurried. Meditative, even. It’s the sort of thing you dip in and out of when the pressures of the real world get too much. It is beautifully designed and deliberately finite; even played half-heartedly, it can be more or less wrapped up within an hour.
The fact that Underwood has switched to mobile gaming speaks volumes about his newfound responsibilities. A president doesn’t have the time to spend all night slouched on a sofa hammering away at a joypad, but he can snatch a few minutes on a phone during a motorcade.
The fact that he’s chosen Monument Valley, of all the thousands of mobile games, is also telling.
It indulges his love of figuring things out, plus it identifies him as a detail-oriented aesthete compared to the likes of David Cameron, forever rubbing his greasy thumbs across his screen as he hamfistedly attempts to beat his own meagre Fruit Ninja highscore.
In fact, Monument Valley isn’t the only indie he has been playing. Later in the season, the same biographer attempts to turn Underwood’s head to The Stanley Parable, an experimental installation that toys with abstract notions of free will. And this might just be the start of Underwood’s voyage into the world of indie gaming – knowing how this run ends, there’s every chance that next series will open on Frank red-eyed and crying, playing one of those sad little online games about piano noises and existentialism. Bring back Call of Duty, I say, before it’s too late.
